And our wonderful morons in Congress are holding on to the money to fight this disease like a sphincter muscle trying to hold it in.

My one wish is that the Aedes mosquito would get past the security at the Capitol and bite every GOP politician, House or Senate on the behind. And since they have small brains already, it would only mean we would have to use an electron microscope to find theirs once infected with Zika.

They don’t want to bail out Puerto Rico, and now they want them to die of a horrible disease along with those who already are infected. Way to go!

I am willing to work with any broker, carrier, or employer interested in saving money on expensive surgeries, and to provide the best care for their injured workers or their client’s employees.

Ask me any questions you may have on how to save money on expensive surgeries under workers’ comp.

I am also looking for a partner who shares my vision of global health care for injured workers.

I am also willing to work with any health care provider, medical tourism facilitator or facility to help you take advantage of a market segment treating workers injured on the job. Workers’ compensation is going through dramatic changes, and may one day be folded into general health care. Injured workers needing surgery for compensable injuries will need to seek alternatives that provide quality medical care at lower cost to their employers. Caribbean and Latin America region preferred.

Health Affairs blog today posted an article about the new rules CMS released on Wednesday that would establish key parameters for the new Quality Payment Program, a framework that includes the Merit-based Incentive Payment System (MIPS) and Alternative Payment Models (APMs). These policies were established by the latest, permanent ‘doc fix,’ the Medicare Access and CHIP Reauthorization Act of 2015 (MACRA).

My writing this morning is not about the proposed rule, the Quality Payment Program, the Merit-based Incentive Payment System (MIPS), or the Alternative Payment Models (APM’s).

But rather, it is about something I first encountered during my first MHA class on Health Care Quality. Reading the assigned readings in the one textbook we were given, I noticed that throughout the last several decades, CMS has released and created many rules, programs, models, and whatnot, that made my head spin. No doubt that is what the good folks at CMS intended, because these rules, programs, models, schemes and “solutions” have only seemed to make the American health care system more complex, confusing, bureaucratic, wasteful, idiotic, and expensive.

When supporters of the current challenger in the Democratic Party presidential primaries say that their candidate will give them free health care, do they really understand and realize how much of a house of cards the entire system is, and one that will collapse if given enough time?

How so, you ask? Well, if you know of any other human-devised system that is so top-heavy, so convoluted, and so complex that the sheer weight of its rules, regulations, laws, programs and models will cause it to collapse, let me know, because the US health care system is the only one I see.

What those who advocate Medicare for All don’t realize (I am one too, but I realize what is at stake), is that even with all of this complexity, people are profiting from the ever continuing releasing of proposed rules, programs and models, and that to simply do away with them is equally as bad as letting it collapse, but at least when it does collapse, we can start all over again and provide the single payer system they want.

Yet, if we scrape it now, those who just got health coverage will lose it, those who never had it will never be able to afford it, and the entities that profit from it will work day and night to prevent the scraping of their “golden goose”.

I don’t have all the answers, but I know this, too many rules, programs, incentives, models, schemes, etc, etc, and so forth, only makes things worse, not better. I don’t remember learning about other nations’ health care systems being so top-heavy and so complex, and maybe, in the final analysis, is why their systems work, and ours does not.

When an American citizen goes abroad and needs medical care in a country such as France (I read one person’s account of what they experienced), the bill they received after treatment was only a few dollars, not hundreds or thousands. Why is that? Maybe because they don’t have a CMS screwing it up.

Maybe it’s because their doctors don’t wave expensive watches in the faces of their patients, or describe their recent safaris where they shot some endangered species in Africa because they were wealthy and believe they have the right to do so, as a Midwestern dentist did last year to a prized lion.

I also remember that during the run-up to the enactment of the ACA, many senior citizens demanded that the government keep its hands off of their Medicaid, and that they did not want some government bureaucrat to make health care decisions for them and their families. Who do they think makes these decisions in health insurance companies? Do they know any corporate “bureaucrats”, or do they think that because they work for a private company, that they are not part of a bureaucracy?

I’ll end this philippic here, but it makes me wonder why we haven’t gotten wise to the fact that too many cooks, too many rules, etc., only make things worse, not better. We need to wake up and join the rest of the industrialized world.

I am willing to work with any broker, carrier, or employer interested in saving money on expensive surgeries, and to provide the best care for their injured workers or their client’s employees.

Ask me any questions you may have on how to save money on expensive surgeries under workers’ comp.

I am also looking for a partner who shares my vision of global health care for injured workers.

I am also willing to work with any health care provider, medical tourism facilitator or facility to help you take advantage of a market segment treating workers injured on the job. Workers’ compensation is going through dramatic changes, and may one day be folded into general health care. Injured workers needing surgery for compensable injuries will need to seek alternatives that provide quality medical care at lower cost to their employers. Caribbean and Latin America region preferred.

Tuesday, Judge David Langham, Deputy Chief Judge of Compensation Claims for the Florida Office of Judges of Compensation Claims and Division of Administrative Hearings, wrote a rather lengthy post about the differences between cost-shifting and case-shifting in workers’ comp.

Much of what the Judge wrote were subjects that I already discussed in a number of previous posts about cost-shifting and case-shifting, so I won’t go into it here. I am only focusing on the parts that relate to Florida workers’ comp. You can read the entire article yourselves.

But what caught my attention was what he said about Florida and what the Workers’ Compensation Research Institute (WCRI) reported in some of their studies on these issues.

As Judge Langham wrote this week, he wrote a post two years ago that asked the question “Why Does Surgery Cost Double in Workers’ Compensation?”

Judge Langham noted in that post that Florida employers have been documented paying almost double for shoulder or knee surgery that is paid for under workers’ compensation, compared to group health costs.

The implication of case-shifting in Florida, he says, could arguably be a doubling of cost.

He cited a WCRI report released earlier this year that suggests however that case-shifting is perhaps not as likely in Florida.

According to the report, Judge Langham continues, “as of July 2011, six states had workers’ comp medical fee schedules with rates within 15% of Medicare rates. They were California, Massachusetts, Florida, North Carolina, New York and Hawaii.”

However, Judge Langham pointed out that the WCRI concluded that case-shifting is more likely in states where the workers’ compensation fee schedule is 20% or more above the group health rates, and not in Florida.

Judge Langham stated that this analysis of workers’ compensation fee schedules does not appear to include analysis of the reimbursement rates for hospitals, and that It also seems contradictory to the assertions that Florida workers’ compensation costs for various surgeries have been documented as roughly double the group health rates (100% higher, not 15% higher).

Injured workers who missed work in the Florida workers’ compensation system could be compensated in 2016 at a rate as high as $862.51 per week, the “maximum compensation rate.”

So, if recovery from such a “soft-tissue” injury required ten weeks off-work, he wrote, the case-shifting to workers’ compensation might add another four to nine thousand dollars to the already doubled cost of surgical repair under workers’ compensation.

This could be directly borne by the employer if the employer is self-insured for workers’ compensation; or, if the employer has purchased workers’ compensation insurance, the effect on the employer would be indirect in the form of potentially increased premium costs for workers’ compensation following such events and payments, Judge Langham states.

According to WCRI, the Judge quotes, “policymakers have always focused on the impact (workers’ compensation) fee schedules have on access to care as well as utilization of services.”

This has been a two-part analysis, he says:

First, fee schedules have to be sufficient such that physicians are willing to provide care in the workers’ compensation system; and second, the reimbursement cannot be too high, or perhaps overutilization is encouraged.

Lastly, Judge Langham points out that the disparity between costs has also been noted in discussions of “medical tourism.”

The last question he posits is this, “might medical decision makers direct care to more efficient providers, across town, across state lines?”

What about national borders?

I am willing to work with any broker, carrier, or employer interested in saving money on expensive surgeries, and to provide the best care for their injured workers or their client’s employees.

Ask me any questions you may have on how to save money on expensive surgeries under workers’ comp.

I am also looking for a partner who shares my vision of global health care for injured workers.

I am also willing to work with any health care provider, medical tourism facilitator or facility to help you take advantage of a market segment treating workers injured on the job. Workers’ compensation is going through dramatic changes, and may one day be folded into general health care. Injured workers needing surgery for compensable injuries will need to seek alternatives that provide quality medical care at lower cost to their employers. Caribbean and Latin America region preferred.

In my previous post, I mentioned that the 1st District Court of Appeal had ruled that attorney fee schedules violated state law.

But the Court of Appeal also ruled back in March in the above referenced case, that the workers comp system was an adequate exclusive remedy, Ms. Goldberg said in her article.

The State Supreme Court accepted jurisdiction to review the decision, and said in its ruling that, “after further consideration and hearing oral argument in this case, we have determined that we should exercise our discretion and discharge jurisdiction.”

I am willing to work with any broker, carrier, or employer interested in saving money on expensive surgeries, and to provide the best care for their injured workers or their client’s employees.

Ask me any questions you may have on how to save money on expensive surgeries under workers’ comp.

I am also looking for a partner who shares my vision of global health care for injured workers.

I am also willing to work with any health care provider, medical tourism facilitator or facility to help you take advantage of a market segment treating workers injured on the job. Workers’ compensation is going through dramatic changes, and may one day be folded into general health care. Injured workers needing surgery for compensable injuries will need to seek alternatives that provide quality medical care at lower cost to their employers. Caribbean and Latin America region preferred.

As reported today by Don McCanne of Physicians for a National Health Plan, and published on Friday in The Intercept, business interests in Colorado and many of the largest lobbying groups around the country and in the state are raising funds to defeat Amendment 69, the single-payer ballot question going before voters this November.

One organization leading the move to defeat this amendment is the Council of Insurance Agents & Brokers, a national trade group.

As quoted in the article by the author, Lee Fang, “The council urges Coloradans to protect employer-provided insurance and oppose Proposition 69.”

The group has dispatched Steptoe & Johnson, a lobbying firm to analyze the bill.

Other lobbying groups that represent major for-profit health care interests in Colorado, including hospitals and insurance brokers, Fang writes, are similarly mobilizing against Amendment 69.

The Colorado Association of Commerce & Industry, a trade group led in part by HCA HealthOne, a subsidiary of HCA, one of the largest private hospital chains in the country is soliciting funds to defeat single payer. The business coalition to defeat the measure also includes the state’s largest association of health insurance brokers, Fang reported.

Dr. McCanne wrote in response to the Fang article that, “In the meantime, the opponents know that their task does not involve educating the public on the facts. They do not have to engage the other side in a information battle over the truth. They merely have to appeal to the passion of the voters. Simple rhetorical soundbites are usually enough to convince the voters that they do not have to waste their time studying some complicated government scheme in order to know how to vote on it. Just look at some of the rhetoric of the opposition group, Coloradans for Coloradans: “doubling the state budget,” “diminishing accessibility and quality,” and “creating an unaccountable, massive bureaucracy.” Who would support that? No need to try to find out the truth.”

What does this really mean?

It means this: that until the whole US health care system collapses of its own weight, inefficiencies, complexities, absurdities, bureaucracy, and stupidity, that no matter who runs for president promising free health care for all, it won’t happen.

Talking in generalities, wishing and hoping that a mass movement (or political revolution) will change things, is only magical thinking and pixie dust. Given the political polarization of the US electorate, and the lack of thinking on the part of those who are supporting the GOP candidates for president and for Congress, single payer nationwide or statewide will not happen until every single American cannot get any health care coverage.

How did the UK get single payer? Thank the Luftwaffe for destroying the British health care system before WWII. Don’t believe me? Just read what Winston Churchill said (Conservative Party – like our Republicans, only smarter):

“Our policy is to create a national health service in order to ensure that everybody in the country irrespective of means, age, sex or occupation shall have equal opportunities to benefit from the best and most up-to-date medical and allied services available.”

How did Germany get a kind of single payer system? Otto von Bismarck. And sixty years later, when the most conservative government Germany ever had came to power, not even a paperhanging, SOB with a Charlie Chaplin moustache could undo it.

Why can’t we have single payer? Read Thomas Jefferson, John Locke, Adam Smith, Edmund Burke, the Constitution and the Declaration of Independence. Any mention of health care or health insurance? No, because they were more concerned with “life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness” however they defined that in the eighteenth century.

Freedom was another thing they were concerned with, such as the freedom to have what is yours remain yours, so that the government can’t take it to spend on such extravagant luxuries as health care and education for all.

But as I wrote back in 2013, the founders did create a tax-based health plan for merchant sailors because it was affecting our national economy and trade. But it was only for a select population group, as was Medicare and Medicaid and SHIP, and Tricare last century.

But the health plan for sailors was never challenged in the courts, nor was it ever a part of any political campaign for the Presidency to be repealed; however, that is not stopping the GOP and their allies from doing the same thing to the ACA, or to any proposal for single payer.

The US is, as that paperhanging SOB is quoted as saying before he took cyanide and shot himself, “the ultra-capitalists”, and therefore, the free market and the profit motive wins out.

You want single payer, Bernie? Start learning the words to “The Internationale”.

Coming back around to the constitutionality of aspects of the various state workers’ comp laws, an article by David De Paolo last week, suggested that rather than corporate America dismantling workers’ comp, it is the courts who are actually doing so.

David says that state supreme courts will be the ones doing the dismantling this year, piece by piece.

A week and a half ago, I wrote that the Oklahoma WC statute relating to the permanent partial disability deferral provisions of the state’s workers compensation statutes of 2013, was struck down in a 7-2 decision.

And David also reported in the same article, that the 1st District Court of Appeals in Florida said that the state’s statutory limits on the payment of attorneys for injured workers was unconstitutional.

So while ProPublica and others rightly or wrongly accuse corporate America, the Koch Brothers, ALEC, ARAWC, the Illuminati, Martians, and anyone else we left out, it is the men and women who wear black robes who are striking down the workers’ comp laws in their states.

Is this a coincidence? Is this a vast conspiracy of right-wing jurists and those who put them on the bench? That is hard to say because we don’t know these people at all, who appointed them, and what their individual political motives are.

But if these decisions are any indication, the courts are ruling more in favor of injured workers, than their employers.

If you read De Paolo’s article and the cases linked to them, as well as the OK case, you will see that the courts are generally siding with workers.

What does this mean?

Well, it is too early to tell, but if these trends continue this year, 2016 may be the year the injured worker gets a little break. But we still have laws, regs, and rules in place that are holding back workers from getting the best health care available, at lower cost, no matter where that happens to be, even if it is not within the borders of their state or the country.

My friend, Maria Todd, PhD, noted International Expert on Healthcare & Health Tourism Business Strategies & Operations, Business Owner, Author, and Speaker, has written a very cogent and to the point article challenging American hospitals on why they eschew inbound medical tourism.

For the uninitiated, inbound medical tourism, or travel, refers to foreign patients traveling to the US or other countries for medical care from their home country.

A case in point was the late, and not lamented, Shah of Iran who was allowed to come to the US for treatment of his cancer, and which led to the taking hostage of our embassy staff, destroying what was left of one presidential administration, and secretly aiding another to win the election, and thus look good in the eyes of the American people, only some time later to that administration selling arms to Iran for other hostages, the cash then used to support the Contras in Nicaragua.

But I digress.

As the Shah had money, he was welcomed with open arms, but Maria wonders why other American hospitals, knowing that they will receive cash, still refuses to seek out inbound medical tourism as an alternative source of revenue.

According to Dr. Todd, “It is estimated that the USA is the 3rd most popular destination for inbound medical tourism from other countries, but the practice of traveling for health has been a “thing” in the USA for more than 100 years.”

Corporations such as Pepsico, Lowe’s Home Improvement, Boeing, WalMart and many other corporations, she writes, with self-funded health plans under ERISA, have the freedom to contract with any hospital, anywhere in the world without going through a managed care network, but can’t because the hospitals with lots of value to offer simply don’t seem interested enough to talk to them.

She wants to know why not? In order for her to find the answer to that and other questions, she is asking her colleagues in healthcare business development and business administration who are executives at leading healthcare institutions and well-equipped ASCs across America: “Why do you eschew medical tourism business?”

This question, and the others that she poses in her article, also relate to outbound medical tourism as well.

Why do employers, insurance companies, the domestic health care industry, which is beset by so many problems and potential shortages and inefficiencies, as well as the entire workers’ compensation industry eschew medical travel for non-work-related illnesses and diseases, and work-related injuries requiring surgery?

I’ve written about this many times before. I have cited American Exceptionalism, racism, xenophobia, greed, ignorance of the quality of medical care abroad, and many other factors, but as Maria points out for US hospitals turning down cash patients, employers and carriers can save money by looking outside our broken and dysfunctional medical care system under workers’ comp.

It’s high time the US joins the rest of the world, and allows our citizens the freedom to go wherever they want for medical care, no matter what the cause, or condition that prompts them to seek medical care that is high quality, and will save money for their employer, and provide them an opportunity to see the world that also belongs to them.

Not to do so is tantamount to enslavement to a corrupt and rigged system that benefits unscrupulous physicians, pharmacies, pain management centers, and other workers’ comp service providers, and harms injured workers.

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Quotes

“Impossible is just a big word thrown around by small men who find it easier to live in the world they’ve been given than to explore the power they have to change it. Impossible is not a fact. It’s an opinion. Impossible is not a declaration. It’s a dare. Impossible is potential. Impossible is temporary. Impossible is nothing.”

– Muhammad Ali

“If people are not laughing at your goals, your goals are too small..”

– Azim Premji

“Those who say your dreams are ridiculous have given up on theirs.”

– Unknown

Permanence, perseverance and persistence in spite of all obstacles, discouragements, and impossibilities: It is this, that in all things distinguishes the strong soul from the weak.

– Thomas Carlyle

“As the work is done for the employer, and therefore ultimately for the public, it is a bitter injustice that it should be the wage-worker himself and his wife and children who bear the whole penalty.”

– President Theodore Roosevelt, 1907

To permit every lawless capitalist, every law-defying corporation, to take any action, no matter how iniquitous, in the effort to secure an improper profit and to build up privilege, would be ruinous to the Republic and would mark the abandonment of the effort to secure in the industrial world the spirit of democratic fair dealing.

– Theodore Roosevelt, 1908

“The modern conservative is engaged in one of man’s oldest exercises in moral philosophy; that is, the search for a superior moral justification for selfishness.”

– John Kenneth Galbraith

“Only a fool would try to deprive working men and women of their right to join the union of their choice.”

– Dwight D. Eisenhower

“I hope we shall crush in its birth the aristocracy of our monied corporations which dare already to challenge our government to a trial by strength, and bid defiance to the laws of our country.”

– Thomas Jefferson

“Mischief springs from the power which the moneyed interest derives from a paper currency which they are able to control, from the multitude of corporations with exclusive privileges… which are employed altogether for their benefit.”

– Andrew Jackson

“I see in the near future a crisis approaching that unnerves me and causes me to tremble for the safety of my country. Corporations have been enthroned, an era of corruption in high places will follow, and the money-power of the country will endeavor to prolong it’s reign by working upon the prejudices of the people until the wealth is aggregated in a few hands and the Republic is destroyed.”

– Abraham Lincoln

“Do not go where the path may lead; go instead where there is no path and leave a trail”

– Ralph Waldo Emerson

“Some men see things as they are and say why. I dream things that never were and say why not.”

“Capital is reckless of the health or length of life of the laborer, unless under compulsion from society.”

– Karl Marx

“The secret of change is to focus all of your energy, NOT on fighting the old, but on BUILDING the NEW.”

– Socrates

“Every man takes the limits of his field of vision for the limits of the world”

– Arthur Schopenhauer

“All truth passes through three stages. First, it is ridiculed. Second, it is violently opposed. Third, it is accepted as being self-evident.”

– Arthur Schopenhauer

“You have enemies? Good. That means you’ve stood up for something, sometime in your life.”

– Winston Churchill

“No matter what people tell you, words and ideas can change the world.”

– Robin Williams

“There can be no equality or opportunity if men and women and children be not shielded in their lives from the consequences of great industrial and social processes which they cannot alter, control, or singly cope with.”

– Woodrow Wilson

“Although it is not true that all conservatives are stupid people, it is true that most stupid people are conservative.”

– John Stuart Mill

“The masters of the government of the United States are the combined capitalists and manufacturers of the United States.”

– Woodrow Wilson

“The test of our progress is not whether we add more to the abundance of those who have much it is whether we provide enough for those who have little.”

– Franklin D. Roosevelt

“Of all the forms of inequality, injustice in health [care] is the most shocking and inhuman[e]…”